1978-December-15

Bilalian News

Ideal Family Life

Imam W. Deen Muhammad

With the Name Allah the Gracious, the Compassionate

As-Salaam-Alaikum

(Editor's note: Following are excerpts of Imam Wallace Deen Muhammad's Khutbah delivered at Masjid Elijah Muhammad in Chicago on the Night of Power, Ramadan 1978.)

All praise is due to Almighty God, the guardian evolver and sustainer of all the worlds. The blessings and peace be upon Muhammad, the Messenger of Allah to us all.

O Allah, guide us, forgive us our faults, and grant us the blessings of faith. I bear witness there is no deity except Allah and I bear witness Muhammad is His Servant and His Messenger. Peace be upon him, his descendants, his companions, the righteous servants, all of them, and upon us in America arid .throughout the world:

If we make the month of Ramadan a month of abstinence from T.V., from the foolishness that's on records and the radio, that will give us a whole month to recuperate, to revive our good senses, to get our good nature back. In a few years we won't be addicted to this insane, maddening, gouging stuff that ties the rhythm of our lives to the rhythm of that world's music in society.

You find yourself moving in patterns and in rhythms set by Hollywood and Motown, and you can't get out of it. You become addicted to it. It becomes a habit like the habit of hard drugs. You miss it. The child wants to kill his parents because they say get off of it.

That's an addiction! Any time you tell your child, "Hey, don't play that, stop it," and the child gets so angry he wants to throw the thing at you, saying, "I hate you."

You can take dope, hard dope from some youngsters and they won't turn against you like that. But just take that record player, take those records away, take that favorite television madness away and they're ready to kill you. Isn't that enough to tell us that thing is too strong an influence between us and our family? Between us and our children?

Let us make Ramadan a month of abstinence from these devil influences in hopes that Allah will give us strength to recuperate and we won't need so much of that dope once we come off Ramadan. A weaning period, that's what we need.

We're not going to get anywhere until we exercise some authority in our house. Brothers have to exercise some authority in the house and not over your children. Brothers, please stop ordering your children around. If you have a wife, let your wife order the children around — I insist on it. Demand that your wife order the children around.

If you have to exercise your authority on somebody, let it be the wife, not the children. That's how this devil turns the children against the male, against the father. Making the father the executor of punishment, the mother the tender, sweet rescuer.

Your children learn to hate you. They don't like your presence in the house. They love mamma, but mamma can't control them. She has no control over them at all. They make you feel so bad sometimes, the way they treat your wife, that you want to get up and throw them out of a 16-story window or something. I know how some of you feel. You got to feel like that if you are a man!

But you don't want to do that. You're a human being. So you just sit there and suffer with pain inside seeing a son.. ."I don't want to do that, I don't want to do it—leave me alone."
What if you were left alone when you were born?...Wish you could speak then and say "leave me alone."

This is a shame! This society isn't going to correct it for us. We have to correct it for ourselves.

Sisters, don't bring the husband out like he's some brute you keep locked up in a dungeon or something. "I can't handle him. He's too much for me. You'd better whip him." That's a shame. You whip him and if you get whipped trying to whip him, the brother knows what to do. Don't call your husband. Let your husband come home and find out what happened and then he's going to tear them up.

Brother, don't even answer her when she tells you to whip them. Just ignore her. Let her whip them. When they get in your way, just walk away from them. Walk out. Let her have the house until she can get it in order. Every time they disturb you so much you can't live in it, walk out until she gets it back in order. If you come back and find that one of them has beat her, you beat him!

If they give you 50 years in jail, go to jail, and believe me, I'll lead the demonstration and we'll sleep out in front of the jail until they let you out. Don't kill him, make him wish he had died in his sleep.

This is what we have to do to get our children back for our wives. Let's give them back to the mothers. And wife, give yourself back to your husband. As long as we don't have that order in our lives, this wicked world has all of us and we don't have anything.

I pledge myself to do all I have asked of you. If you catch my daughter around here displaying herself in short dresses, tight pants, you get the word back to us. If Shirley doesn't execute the law, I'm going to strike her a little. If striking her doesn't work, I'm going to let her strike me a little and if that doesn't work, I'm going to have a fit in the house. I'm going to blow my stack.

No. We are not going to go to these extremes because we are Muslims and it is not my striking her lightly that she respects or that she accepts, it's Allah's judgment and his law — that's where the victory is.

The victory is in our seeing Allah and his law and Prophet Muhammad as the example of authority in our lives. Then what we do is no more than what we have been given permission to do. That's success. It works!

The wife doesn't resent it, the husband doesn't abuse the right. The children respect it because they know that sometimes mamma would like to say, "It's okay. You can do it. "But mamma can't say it's okay because God says it's not okay. Isn't God wonderful?

See how strong Allah is? If Allah were like us. and wanted this kind of permissiveness to keep the love, He could have said, "If you want to do that, if you really want it, I love you, I can't see you without it. Do it." He could have been a permissive God that just wants to keep our affection, to keep us loving Him. But He's a firm God who says, "This is best for you, do it or suffer the consequences."

See how we don't have to bear the burden all by ourselves. We can say, "I love you, child, and to tell you the truth, sometimes I want to see you eat all the sugar you want. Just have your fun, do whatever you like. Satisfy yourself to your heart's desire. But God says 'No.' I have to obey God."

See how Allah has taken some of the burden off of us. That's what I depend on. I'm a human being and to tell you the truth, my heart hurts sometimes because I have to correct my children.

My wife sticks up for them and I say, "You shouldn't do that." She says, "Well, they're going-to be hurt." I say, "Well, you just have to hurt them."

It hurts me because I'm tender-hearted. But God is more important than my tender heart and everything else. God knows best what will save our house and our family. So, I stand up for it.

God has taken some of the burden off me, some of the pressure off me because I know that really I'm only doing it because I have to obey God, and the children and the whole family should accept it that way.

We have a dependency to satisfy our sentiments even when they are moving blindly. God has given us the protection. Shouldn't we love that? –

Allah is the perfect being. Allah is all righteous, truthful — no imperfections in Allah. Allah, is supreme and Perfect without any imperfections.

O Allah. Make us of those who purify themselves and of those who repent, and guide us in your path. Amen.

Peace be to you
Your brother in service to Allah,
Wallace Deen Muhammad

(To be continued)